{"id":6062,"date":"2022-12-06T12:51:52","date_gmt":"2022-12-06T12:51:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=6062"},"modified":"2022-12-11T18:06:41","modified_gmt":"2022-12-11T18:06:41","slug":"victory-citrus-is-sweet-by-thoraiya-dyer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=6062","title":{"rendered":"Victory Citrus is Sweet<\/em><\/strong> by Thoraiya Dyer"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Victory Citrus is Sweet<\/em><\/strong> by Thoraiya Dyer (Tor.com, 7th<\/sup> September 2022) has an intriguing opening where the narrator of the piece, Victory Citrus, details one of the hazards of space travel:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

Cosmic rays buggered up my right arm just after we took the mission.
That is, some stupid high-energy proton started up an osteosarc in my ulna, which is a new one for me. Last cancer I got was lympho, in my lung. Which was annoying, because you can\u2019t isolate and freeze a lung and keep working.
Lung isolation means a stupid induced coma while the new cells grow and Printer Two compiles a clean, connective tissue scaffold. It means sitting still for six weeks after the graft, somewhere with one-third G or more, waiting for it to take.
It means someone else gets the good jobs. Steals your promotion. I\u2019m not bitter. Who can blame protons? They do what they do. Planet-bounds call us bobble-heads, because of the thick shielding on our helmets. One thing we can\u2019t replace are our brains. But high-mass, high-density helmets don\u2019t weigh anything up here. We take them off when we land, and the smart suits hold our spongy skeletons upright until the dirt jobs are done.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s a data-dump beginning, but it works, and we soon find out that Citrus has had to freeze her arm in nitrogen (which is in short supply) to stop the cancer growth so she can do a job on Mercury (her ship Whaleshark<\/em> is headed to Gog\u2019s Gorge to investigate a mass driver that is slinging refined uranium to the wrong hemisphere on Mars). Further information follows about (a) the nitrogen availability problem; (b) her childhood upbringing in a cr\u00e8che run by bots; and (c) her apprentice Naamla (who at the end of the story we learn is the daughter of the spacer that Citrus was apprenticed to and who she now views as a rival). This is all reminiscent of the level of novel detail that you get in the early short work of John Varley, as is the chirpy conversational style of the piece:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

I won an astronaut\u2019s apprenticeship in a lottery my parents entered me in before I was born.
Don\u2019t really remember them. Bots raised me in a creche. The bots came cheap, secondhand, from an Earth retirement village, and asked questions like, Are your bowel movements within normal parameters? Does the fleeting beauty of the blossoms make you ache with bittersweet memories? Your cortisol levels are high, do you feel you have failed your family members?<\/em>
One of those was semi-appropriate for toddlers, I guess?
My personal bot had previously cared for someone with very specific music tastes, which is how I got acquainted with Earth sounds of the 1960s.
According to my EleAlloc service record, my worst hangover from being raised by bots is that I get squicked out by the sight of human eyeballs moving in their sockets.
I mean, anyone could get squicked out by that, right?
When I have to do my self-health-checks, and see my own reflected eyeballs moving, it makes me shout, \u201cNO!\u201d
Without fail. Every time. And I\u2019m twenty-three years old, so I shouldn\u2019t be shouting at myself in the mirror. I can\u2019t help it. Eyeballs are so gross.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The main action occurs when the pair arrive on Mars and discover, in short succession, a gas vent near the drilling site, electron bursts that are transmitting the Fibonacci Sequence, and then (spoiler) animal\/fish\/lobster-like beings exiting crevasses in the ground\u2014to their death\u2014seventy clicks south of the first vent.
The rest of the story sees Citrus and Naamla investigate the body fragments of the dead aliens (they have a sulphur chemistry instead of a carbon one) and then attempt to communicate with them\u2014they succeed, whereupon the Mercurians provide the nitrogen that Citrus needs. Then Citrus and Naamla realise that the mining operation has caused catastrophic damage to the underground Mercurian civilization, so they attempt to convince the Martian authorities to start slinging bismuth back from Mars to fill in the holes (and they enlist Naamla\u2019s father to help them do this). Finally, having been over-exposed to radiation and developed multiple cancers, the pair enter comas to regrow their affected body parts.
The last section sees Naamla\u2019s father wake them up\u2014their limbs have been regrown, the Mercurians have been saved, and we learn Citrus\u2019s apprentice name: Hogwash Perjury.
This is a fast paced, inventive, and colourful First Contact story. That said, the scene where Citrus almost effortlessly communicates with the Mercurians stretches credulity to breaking point.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 7,450 words. Story link<\/a>.

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Victory Citrus is Sweet by Thoraiya Dyer (Tor.com, 7th September 2022) has an intriguing opening where the narrator of the piece, Victory Citrus, details one of the hazards of space travel: Cosmic rays buggered up my right arm just after we took the mission.That is, some stupid high-energy proton started up an osteosarc in my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1396],"tags":[539,46,718,1397,12,1395,116],"class_list":["post-6062","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thoraiya-dyer","tag-539","tag-3-3","tag-first-contact","tag-mercury","tag-short-story","tag-thoraiya-dyer","tag-tor-com"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6062","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6062"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6062\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6077,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6062\/revisions\/6077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6062"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6062"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}